LETTER Communicated by Matteo Cavaliere Time-Free Spiking Neural P Systems

Differentbiologicalprocesses takedifferent times tobe completed,which can also be influenced by many environmental factors. In this work, a re-alistic definition of nonsynchronized spiking neural P systems (SN P systems, for short) is considered: during the work of an SN P system, the execution times of spiking rules cannot be known exactly (i.e., they are arbitrary). In order to establish robust systems against the environmental factors, a special class of SN P systems, called time-free SN P systems, is introduced, which always produce the same computation result indepen-dent of the execution times of the rules. The universality of time-free SN P systems is investigated. It is proved that these P systems with extended rules (several spikes can be produced by a rule) are equivalent to regis-ter machines. However, if the number of spikes present in the system is bounded, then the power of time-free SN P systems falls, and in this case, a characterization of semilinear sets of natural numbers is obtained.